Campus Cards >> Shoppin' Via Consortium

• By Matt Villano
• 02/25/05

For a trio of schools in Vermont, forming a card consortium for campus shoppers means functionality, cost-savings, and new revenue streams.

The northeast city of Burlington, Vermont is a cozy little college town; a tiny metropolis where pleasantries reign. Strangers smile and wave hello as they pass on the street; drivers stop for pedestrians in the crosswalks; neighbors band together to shovel snow in teams. But Burlington also is home to an outstanding campus card collaboration: a consortium that has combined multisite card services at the 9,400-student University of Vermont (UVM) with two smaller colleges, Saint Michael’s and Champlain. The effort, which began in January 2004 and grew again this past summer, extended the resources of UVM to two colleges with smaller campus populations and limited resources. While each school offers different campus cards, the three share the same card system, a CSGold suite from Diebold (www.diebold.com). Students, faculty, and staff members from any of the three institutions can use card-based debit capabilities at more than 100 merchants and restaurants in town, as well as at vending machines, laundromats, and copy centers on every campus. What’s more, UVM (the school managing the multisite system) has turned the effort into a new revenue stream, and earns $1 per student, per month from the two other schools that participate, or a guaranteed minimum of $47,000 per year.

“This collaborative card system really has revolutionized the way most of Burlington’s student population lives their lives,” says Mark McKenna, manager of the CATcard service center at UVM and one of the masterminds behind the effort. “It’s pretty amazing what you can accomplish on a broad scale when you work together toward a goal that benefits everyone.”

Getting Started

The consortium effort began back in the summer of 2001, when representatives from Saint Michael’s College in nearby Colchester contacted McKenna at UVM, while administrators at Saint Michael’s were researching options for a card system of their own. At the time, UVM was running its CATcard system via archaic technology from a now-defunct card vendor (Griffin), and the school was tinkering with the idea of investing in some new technology of its own. During the discussions, McKenna told UVM and Saint Michael’s administrators that he wanted a system capable of delivering debit card functionality to nearly 18,000 student, faculty, and staff users both on and off campus, a system through which he also could manage facilities access, off-campus purchasing, and a variety of other functions. Much to his surprise, the contingent from Saint Michael’s wanted some of the very same things.

Then it dawned on them: What if the schools collaborated on a system that served them both? UVM had in the pas entertained the possibility of hosting a card system for neighboring Champlain College, but dragged feet on both sides caused the idea to falter in critical planning phases. Now, however, McKenna had himself a willing partner, and renewed hope for a deal. Senior administrators from both institutions met to discuss specifics of collaboration. Behind closed doors, officials decided that the best way to link up the two schools would be to establish a dedicated T1 connection between UVM’s central processor and Saint Michael’s switch room. According to Dave Coseo, director of Purchasing and Auxiliary Services at Saint Michael’s, the rest was history.

“Once we set up the T1, we knew that, technically, we could do this without a problem,” he says now, looking back. “That was really the biggest obstacle to the entire project.”

Choosing a Vendor

Next came the process of picking a card vendor. McKenna and his colleagues at UVM had been in negotiations with Diebold for a while, and when they told Diebold execs about the need to incorporate Saint Michael’s into the system, the vendor suggested a new system, CSGold. McKenna estimates the system has cost UVM $150,000 for the server, software, cards, and database with unlimited capacity for growth; the database is a feature ideally suited to one school offering services to another. Diebold sales reps assured the schools that the system could manage two institutions through one Oracle enterprise server (www.oracle.com) and one CSGold transaction processor. Diebold company officials, including Mark Reinart, director of Marketing and Product Development, reviewed the plan and offered their support.

Where’s the Money?

The moral support was encouraging, but no amount of vendor enthusiasm would have helped the schools foot the $150,000 bill. Instead, McKenna and Coseo put their heads together and devised an ingenious strategy to defray the cost of the system, essentially paying for CSGold with revenues from sharing its capabilities. In a nutshell, Saint Michael’s agreed to pay UVM $2,500 per month for access to the system and all of its functionality, or roughly $1 per student, per month. (As with Visa or MasterCard, merchants also pay a transaction fee of 3.35 to 9 percent, depending upon the volume of business they do; the more business, the lower the rate.) With 2,200 Saint Michael’s students using the system, and room for growth, this arrangement would net UVM $30,000 per year. Coseo reports an initial investment of about $86,000 in infrastructure for Saint Michael’s, but this was money the college would have had to invest in order to accommodate any card system—let alone one they would have had to shell out $150,000 for, had UVM not come into the picture.

“By collaborating, we both saved a tremendous amount of resources up front,” agrees UVM’s McKenna. “What we gained was a solid revenue source—and the great publicity of a big state institution helping out a smaller college.”

Putting the Plan into Action

With a financing plan in place, the schools moved on to ironing out responsibilities vis-á-vis the new technology. First, UVM would maintain ownership of its central server and processor, but configured CSGold to allow Saint Michael’s cardholders to use their new “Knightcards” at on- and off-campus merchant locations throughout Burlington. (As with off-campus merchants around UVM and Champlain, merchants purchase their own card reader/printer equipment, or can order one through UVM, for about $180.) Saint Michael’s, for its part, would maintain ownership of its own database, as well as its own student information system, Colleague, from Datatel ( www.datatel.com). Saint Michael’s would develop extracts from the database and system that would work with CSGold. The college also accepted responsibility for troubleshooting any difficulties with its own technologies, and agreed to set up a campus card office to distribute cards and manage day-to-day operations.

Next, of course, came the implementation itself. UVM and Saint Michael’s finalized their agreements toward the end of October 2001, and the partnership was set to go live in January 2002, so the schools worked fast to get the system up to snuff. In the end, the implementation took 72 days. UVM students already had their cards, but Saint Michael’s had to procure card stock, print cards, and encode each one with appropriate student ID data. Coseo and staff distributed cards before Christmas break, promising to have the system working when students returned. Today, Coseo recalls that the system went live on a Monday, although the Thursday prior, nothing worked. “It got a little hairy toward the end, but we did it,” he jokes. “Things have been better around here ever since.”

Champlain Antes In

As the collaboration has matured, it has attracted attention from other local Vermont schools. In August 2004, officials at Champlain College, the school that once entertained the possibility of collaboration with UVM, decided it was time to join the party. Aaron Videtto, Telecommunications administrator, contacted McKenna and expressed interest in signing on 2,500 new users—1,700 full-time students and 800 part-timers. For Videtto, the task was even easier than it had been for Coseo at Saint Michael’s: Because Champlain’s campus sits adjacent to UVM’s, officials had, years before, installed fiber optic cables for an Ethernet connection connecting the two schools.

This existing T1 connection enabled McKenna and his implementation team to launch the Champlain program quickly, after $9,000 in improvements to the equipment, and the CC-CashCard program was born. Champlain signed on at the same rate as Saint Michael’s: $1 per student per month, or a guaranteed minimum of $20,000 per year. Perhaps the toughest part of the Champlain installation was integration; Champlain uses an AS400 student management system from IBM ( www.ibm.com), necessitating special programming that facilitates a) the transfer of information into the Oracle database, as well as b) a number of custom flags to smooth synchronization into the CSGold processor. Champlain also utilizes proximity-based card readers from Best Access (www.bestaccess.com) to handle access control, another roadblock that required special attention. “When you’re building a system like this, you have to do whatever it takes to write your way around systems that won’t communicate,” Videtto says. “We’re piggy-backing off their system, so when they want to upgrade, they do it, and we need to just go along with it.”

Down the Road

So far, for all three schools, “going along” with the multisite campus card collaboration has paid huge dividends. Videtto deems “a shared knowledge base of information and skills” Champlain’s greatest benefit from participation in the multi-institutional collaboration. At Saint Michael’s, Coseo agrees, noting that his students now have access to services they “never could have dreamed of” without the help of a larger, richer institution such as UVM. And at UVM, McKenna gives the collaboration rave reviews of his own; not only has the deal established an annual revenue stream of at least $50,000 a year, it also has inspired the school to develop a plan for offering other IT services to Saint Michael’s and Champlain, as well as expanded card services to schools of all levels across the Green Mountain State.

McKenna reveals that he’s considering expanding the CSGold multisite card services consortium to incorporate Middlebury College in central Vermont, and nearby Norwich University in Northfield, down the road. He says he’s even considered trying to sell wireless ID-card-based services to Burlington-area elementary and secondary schools, all as part of the CSGold offering. First, though, UVM may go ahead and implement Diebold’s CSHousing, and roll it out to the consortium partners. McKenna says that with an additional $1 per user per month fee, UVM could capture an added $45,000 to $50,000 yearly.

“The trickle-down aspects of this whole project are pretty much limitless,” he says. “We have lifted the lid off the box and suddenly everyone is thinking about how they can make things better.”